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As one of those Intel 510 owners, I wish Intel would release some differing firmware releases to enhance some aspects of drive performance (I for one would enjoy smaller read and write ability over top end speed the 510 has). It's good to see some improved performance with the M4 at any rate, and there weren't many fixes needed either. Between the Crucial C300 and m4, the Intel 510, and the Corsair P3, you can get some vastly different performance characteristics just on firmware alone.

I don't regret buying the 510, but I do regret not saving some money and getting the Performance 3, a drive which recently was going for >$100 less than the 120 GB 510 on Newegg a few days ago. So all told, Micron powered drives are -mostly- the same, but there are some important differences -- mostly price. If you don't want a SandForce controlled SSD, get which ever one is cheaper.Reply

What counts most for me, is that the M4 seem very reliable. And all of the bad things really are solved. I'm very tempted to buy the 256GB one. Also for what you get, it's absolutely great.

With the price they are currently offering it's a very competitive product, and we all know that competition is good. :)

Also Crucial seems to have a great customer service, which is a mood point but still nice to know.

With all of the trouble about sandforce drives, Corsair force 3, OCZ vertex 2 and vertex 3, I absolutely don't want to risk any data corruption/loss. Why spend more and have a greater risk? Why all the bleeding edge products, when you can get nearly same results for a much friendlier price.Reply

I am one of the few,( or many ) who don't want a Sandforce based SSD and cant afford the Intel SSD. Crucial provides a very good balance SSD for a competitive price with m4. And the 0009 Firmware just sweeten the deal.Reply

This drive has on a few occasions, and as recently as yesterday, had 15% codes at newegg. I got mine for $350 with one, and for a few days there you could get it as low as $333. Nuts deal for a drive that not only offers more usable space but none of that random BSOD shit you get with SF. Wait for another 15% off code, grab one, profit.Reply

Running Vertex 3 on P67 chipset (ASUS board)... since firmware 09 release I had two hard locks requiring shut down computer (disconnect from UPS, wait, reconnect, run)... so the situation was much better... instead of few locks a day to one per month... given the machine runs 24/7.Installed firmware 11 today, curious if it solves the issue completely.Other than that starting visual studio 2010 and opening project below 2 secs is just epic. Though as long as my machine runs without issues for 3 monts at least, I can't recommend the drive to any customer or friend.Reply

TRIM commands cannot be passed to a raid array. TRIM can be passed to drives on systems that have an nonraided SSD alongside raided standard drives (this has only happened a few months ago).

Some drives do not require trim because they have an internal garbage collection built into the firmware such as the sandforce drives. Although Crucial has garbage collection as well, it does not occur aggressively to recover if the drive performance gets murdered by random writes. It WILL eventually recover its performance but TRIM makes sure this is never a problem.

Sandforce seems the only way to go for RAIDed drives but I would say you're better off buying a larger SSD to begin with to avoid these problems.Reply

It is NOT true that the Sandforce GC is notably better than the Crucial/Marvell GC.

Anand has a terrible method of trying to measure the GC effectiveness. Running HD Tach is just an absurd way to look at how GC performs under realistic work loads. It is almost impossible to name a realistic workload that does large sequential writes OF A STREAM OF ZEROS across the entire span of the SSD. The Sandforce drives just compress the stream of zeros by a factor of about 10, and therefore need to write only about 10% as much data to flash as the Crucial/Marvell, thus making it look like the performance with Sandforce does not degrade much. But if you wrote the same workload to the SSD with incompressible data, the Sandforce GC performs similarly to the Crucial/Marvell GC.

This problem with Anand's testing has been pointed out to him before, but he continues to print misleading information.

Anyone who is interested in looking at sustained performance of SSDs without TRIM should look at the industry standard test protocols as defined in the SNIA documents for "Solid State Storage (SSS) Performance Test Specification (PTS)"

In particular, the is a pre-conditioning test that specifies using random data and 4KB random writes to get the drive into a steady-state condition. By measuring IOPS vs time while doing 4KB random writes, it is possible to observe the degradation in performance. Then after the drive reaches steady-state, more extensive tests are run to determine sustained performance. This is the sort of testing that Anand should be doing.Reply

I've been running two C300 drives for about a year, and an m4 for about two months. Absolutely no problems in that time. Given that these drives were substantially (!) cheaper than the alternatives, and available in large capacities (total of 1TB) I've got to consider them excellent purchases. I'm definitely willing to give up a little speed for reliable and less expensive drives.Reply

Why do you let us know that the some of the others are attached to a 6Gbps port, but not some. This chart and review are not useful, unless you provide that data. This seems like a no brainier. Are you purposely handicapping the drives that aren't attached to 6Gbps ports? What is the motivation for this?Reply

Considering it's called "Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 6Gbps (240GB)" it looks like a simply typo and was meant to be "Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB (6Gbps)"... which is supported by the fact that the Vertex 3 pushes > 500 MB/s in the article, which would be impossible using SATA-2. The Samsung doesn't support SATA-3. Chill, mate.Reply

The 256gb M4 is still $439.99 at my local retailer/etailer, and $399.99 at newegg.ca - hopefully the price comes down a bit to match what it is going for in the U.S., because it is an excellent value compared to the 510 at those prices.Reply

I'm tempted to pick this up while Newegg has it on sale, but I've been trying to convince myself to buy an Intel SSD instead for a while now due to what everyone says about reliability. With a 2007 Santa Rosa MBP, I'll be limited by the slow SATA interface anyway, so reliability trumps speed. It's just hard to justify spending $300 or more on an upgrade rather than saving the money for a new machine when I'm this far outside of AppleCare.

What's most interesting is that we may have another good controller. Marvell has been making them for a while, but not as a preferred vendor for some. A rock solid controller that's not SF or Intel is a good thing.Reply

I'm still rockin my 160GB Intel X25-M SSD. It's hard to imagine the new drivers are faster than what I have now. It's the only drive in my computer and my box boots up lightning fast and apps open in an instant.Reply

fhaddad78 I concur. I am going to be building a small ITX system next month for a friend and I couldn't decide on either 64GB M4, 470 or slightly more expensive 80GB 320. Reading reviews on the 470 and the M4 question their ability to maintain their speed over the months of use.

I've had an X25-M 80GB in my current setup for 8 months now running the Optimizer once a week. I decided to do something I've never done to my SSD, which is to benchmark it. After 8 months of use the values were exactly what Anand's graphs showed for my SSD when it was doing the rounds on the reviews.

Think my decsion has been made. Deffinately worth a little extra for the quality of the product.Reply

256GB M4 is about $430...1GB $1.67128GB M4 is about $200...1GB $1.5664GB M4 is about $110...1GB $1.71the price in China...so,as a Chinese,I really can not understand why we are low income, but the price is highT TReply

You self have recommended and the Intel SSD 320 have gain a lot of credit for it's reliability. Since this is debated i think you leave out Intels complete SSD disk is bad... and give the performance a to important role. No disk is useful if you loose the data on it...Reply

You to help me withI bought Crucial SSD SSD 512 GB M4, yesterday is still attached to the SERVER received, read, save data normally but today it does not grease the machine up to store data, not to delete data. The way you see the fix on my answer helps, thank you.Reply